Voices of Mono-Ha Artists: Contemporary Art in Japan, Circa 1970 Reiko Tomii (Section Editor)

Voices of Mono-ha Artists: Contemporary Art in Japan, Circa 1970 Reiko Tomii (Section Editor) From a panel discussion at the University of Southern California, February 2012 Transcribed by Hayato Fujioka Translated by Rika Iezumi Hiro and Reiko Tomii with Mika Yoshitake This issue of the Review of Japanese Culture and Society inaugurates the special feature section “Art in Focus,” with Reiko Tomii serving as Section Editor. Over the years the Review has featured issues devoted to art and art history including “Japanese Art: The Scholarship and Legacy of Chino Kaori,” edited by Melissa McCormick (vol. XV); “1960s Japan: Art Outside the Box,” edited by Reiko Tomii (vol. XVII); “Expo ’70 and Japanese Art: Dissonant Voices,” edited by Midori Yoshimoto (vol. XXIII); and “Beyond Tenshin: Okakura Kakuzō’s Multiple Legacies,” edited by Noriko Murai and Yukio Lippit (vol. XXIV). Although art is a specialized discipline, it has a broad range of sister disciplines—architecture, design, and visual culture, to name just a few—and interdisciplinary scholarship is one of the most exciting recent developments in the field of art history. Another important development is the robust presence of contemporary Japanese art in today’s globalizing culture, which poses a new set of questions to scholars of art history and its sister fields. TheReview has therefore decided to institute the “Art in Focus” section as a regular feature of the journal in order to have a sustained and timely engagement with the fast-evolving field of art historical study. The inaugural focus is “Voices of Mono-ha Artists: Contemporary Art in Japan, Circa 1970,” based on a symposium of the same title held at the University of Southern California on February 24, 2012 (pl.1). The program was organized by Miya Elise Mizuta and Reiko Tomii and presented by the University of Southern California’s Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture in association with PoNJA-GenKon (a scholarly listserv for postwar Japanese art; www.ponja-genkon.net), and in conjunction with the exhibition Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha, held at Blum & Poe from February 25 to April 14, 2012. The artist participants were Haraguchi Noriyuki, Koshimizu Susumu, Lee Ufan, Sekine Nobuo, and Suga Kishio. The group of scholars who engaged the Mono-ha artists 200 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY DECEMBER 2013 Reiko Tomii in discussion was headed by Mika Yoshitake, Assistant Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washingon, D.C., who curated the exhibition Requiem for the Sun, and Reiko Tomii, an independent scholar and a co-founder of PoNJA-GenKon. They worked together with Joan Kee, Assistant Professor in the History of Art at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and Hollis Goodall, Curator of Japanese Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The team was assisted by Rika Iezumi Hiro, a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Southern California, who served as an interpreter for the artists. Part of the inaugural programming of the Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture, the event was realized with the generous financial support of The Japan Foundation, Los Angeles, USC’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and USC’s East Asian Studies Center. Blum & Poe helped coordinate the event to coincide with the opening of the exhibit at their gallery. Thanks to Registrars Sam Kahn and Minna Schilling at Blum & Poe and the staff of Fergus McCaffery for their assistance with image rights and reproductions. Images courtesy and © the artists unless otherwise noted. DECEMBER 2013 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY 201 What Is Mono-ha? Mika Yoshitake Representing a key art historical turning point in the late 1960s to the early 1970s, the exhibition Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha (Blum and Poe, 2013) brought together over fifty works including major outdoor works, installations, reliefs, works on paper, photographs, and a film, as well as rare photo-documentation of the artists’ production process critical to their practice.1 The exhibition introduced the growing tendency of Mono-ha artists to present transient arrangements of raw, untreated natural and industrial materials—such as canvas, charcoal, cotton, dirt, Japanese paper, oil, rope, stones, wooden logs, glass panes, electric bulbs, plastic, rubber, steel plates, synthetic cushions, and wire—often laid directly on the floor and interacting with the existing architectural space, or in an outdoor field. The title of the exhibition refers to the death of the sun as emblematic of the loss or failure of symbolic expression and permanence immanent to the object itself. The title is also a reference to the aftermath of a tumultuous era that saw political upheaval against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, anti-Vietnam War protests, and the oil crisis that complicated the artists’ own cultural position and relationship to the nation itself. It does not refer to a holistic “return to nature,” tradition, or Japanese uniqueness. For many of the Mono-ha artists, identity itself is especially defined by the condition of ambiguity. The aim of the exhibition was to re-evaluate this internationally historical moment from the standpoint of our present moment. Reiko Tomii raises a provocative set of contradictions in her introduction to the panel, which makes evident the art historical complexities and the challenges that have surrounded the study of Mono-ha both historically and in the present. Indeed, like Arte Povera, Minimalism, and post-Minimalism, Mono-ha was not a self-defined movement, but a discursive phenomenon coined retroactively by critics around 1973.2 Here, I would like to briefly introduce the development of Mono-ha, the core elements of its “practice” and present some distinct characteristics of the phenomenon as a whole. 202 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY DECEMBER 2013 Mika Yoshitake Mono-ha’s Discursive Emergence As a discursive movement, Mono-ha’s beginnings can be traced back to February 1970, when six artists were featured together for the first time in the art journal Bijutsu techō (Art Notebook), in a section titled “Voices of Emerging Artists: From the Realm of Non- Art” (fig. 18.1).3 The issue acknowledges the place of Sekine Nobuo’s now legendary Phase—Mother Earth (Isō—Daichi, 1968, pl. 2), which is generally credited as the first Mono-ha piece, by reproducing on its title page, not its final result but one scene from the process of its production. To present this work, Sekine extracted dirt from the ground, preserved that earth in a cylinder that towered over the hole, and at the end of the exhibition, returned the dirt back into the earth. The image Bijutsu techō editors selected depicts Sekine and his art school colleagues unraveling large plywood boards from the cylinder of Phase—Mother Earth. In doing so, Bijutsu techō boldly announced the arrival of a new generation of artists. The special feature included a roundtable discussion between Sekine and his colleagues from Tama Art University (Koshimizu Susumu, Narita Katsuhiko, Suga Kishio, and Yoshida Katsurō) titled “Mono Opens a New World,” moderated by Japan-based Korean artist and writer, Lee Ufan.4 The term mono (thing) was printed with brackets and written in Japanese hiragana (もの) to distinguish it from a physical object denoted by its Chinese characters (物, also read butsu). Their agenda, the artists claimed, was distinct from other anti-art movements of the post-war period, and in particular from that launched by Yoshihara Jirō, leader of the 1950s action-based art group Gutai, who identified the tactile substance of matter (busshitsu 物質) with the human spirit.5 The term mono was also distinct from obuje, derived from the French word objet, which emerged as a preferred term in the Anti- Art context of the early 1960s in Japan to describe the found or appropriated objects that artists elevated to the status of art by transposing them into an aesthetic context, a gesture with its roots in the ready-mades of Duchamp in the 1910s.6 Rather, their discussion provoked affective sensations arising from encounters with matter, which they expressed through colloquial words such as dokitto (heartstopping), zokutto (spine-chilling), or shibireru (thrilling), indicating a charged discovery and engagement. When Lee asked the artists in the roundtable to state what Figure 18.1 stage they found most critical in their Sekine Nobuo, Koshigemachi Yoriko, and Uehara Takako with Phase-Mother Earth, 1968. “Voices of Emerging working method (the plan, process, or Artists—From the Realm of Non-Art.” Bijutsu techō, no. result), Sekine emphasized that each stage 436 (February 1970): 11–12. Photo: Koshimizu Susumu. engendered a state of liberation that was DECEMBER 2013 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY 203 Mika Yoshitake important in revealing the essential state of things. Mono would seem to constitute a passage (a phase or an intermediary) that located meaning not in its objective form, but in the structure in which things reveal their existence. This process further involved rejecting the notion of a work as a “mirror onto which you projected your ideal or concept.”7 Koshimizu cited as a precedent Duchamp’s “art coefficient,” which Duchamp defined as “the arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.”8 Lee summarized the artists’ attempts to define their work as a “structure of acts” that “allows us to perceive a world that transcends the initial intention or method, as well as all concepts.”9 For the roundtable discussion, shigusa (仕草), which can be translated as “act” or “gesture,” proved to be a key term for Lee during this time in defining Mono-ha.10 Shigusa, as Lee defined it, is not simply an expression of an intention, but initiates a process of enacting and being acted upon and dissolves the distinction between the subject and the object in an intimate contact with the world.

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